On 12/05/2014 01:32 AM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
As a user/re-mixer, I don't like it. I'm at the point now
where I need
a rolling release. I can live with a six-month or eight-month lag
between desktop updates, but I can't live without regular updates to R
and R packages, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, QGIS, the Python data science
tools, etc. And I'm running the Developer Edition of Firefox, which
updates almost every day.
There's only one major distro now with a calendar-driven release
cadence, and quite frankly I don't know how they do it. Everyone else
is either rolling, try for calendar but don't ship if it's fatally
broken (Fedora and openSUSE), or ship when it's solid and stable and
supportable (Debian and RHEL).
I'm probably going to run at least one of my machines on Rawhide after
the F21 release, but I think the "sweet spot" is what openSUSE has
done - a stable release with a nominal eight-month cycle and a rolling
release (Tumbleweed) layered over that. I'd like Fedora to at least
consider something similar.
Minor version updates are allowed by the update policy, and packages
like Firefox are in effect on a rolling release anyway. I believe R is
also updated quite regularly.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Updates_Policy#All_other_updates
Do we have the manpower for a Tumbleweed-style repo that is built
against the stable release as its core? Or perhaps the present upgrade
policy is sufficient, and the lack of updates Ed cite is already a
reflection of a lack of available manpower to update the packages he
mentioned (apart from PostgreSQL, where we wouldn't want to upgrade
mid-release).
Ed, could you perhaps cite specific R and Python tools where you find
the current version to be insufficiently up-to-date?
We could perhaps create a tracker for update requests, and provide a
Bugzilla template for it linked to from the package database and from
the Fedora homepage - that way we could prioritize what packages users
really want updated.
Best regards,
--
Michel Alexandre Salim
Fedora Project Contributor:
http://fedoraproject.org/
Email: salimma(a)fedoraproject.org | GPG key ID: A36A937A
IDs: keybase.io/michel-slm | IRC: michel_slm(a)irc.freenode.net
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